This is the story of Russia's Lena Highway, aka the Highway from Hell.

The Russian Federal Highway runs from Moscow city to the Siberian city of Yakutsk. The last 600 miles is called the “Lena Highway”. This bizarre road runs parallel to the Lena River on the final leg to Yakutsk.

As you can readily see for yourself from the picture, in the summertime, the Lena Highway turns completely to mud whenever it rains.

There are several Internet sites that consider the Lena Highway to be the worst road in the world.

Personally I would give this dubious honor to Bolivia's Road of Death (next story). After all, no one gets killed in the mud, just incredibly aggravated. People actually die on the Bolivian road all the time.

Yakutsk is the capital of the Yakutia Republic, part of the vast Russian region known as Siberia.

The old joke is ‘War is God's way of teaching us geography’. With that in mind, any kid who grew up playing the board game Risk remembers Yakutsk and neighboring Kamchatka as two territories with weird names located up at the top of Asia. As a kid, I had never heard of these places until I played Risk. Nor did it ever dawn on me that people actually live there (as if getting stuck in the mud is considered living... )

The road of mud isn't the only problem. It seems that people who live in Yakutsk were born to suffer. Yakutsk is considered the coldest city on earth, with January temperatures averaging -45 °F. The coldest temperatures ever recorded outside Antarctica occur in the basin of the Yana River just to the northeast of Yakutia. Yakutsk, the capital, is the world's biggest city built on top of continuous permafrost. Most houses are mounted on concrete piles to keep from sinking.

Surprisingly, for most of the year, the driving is excellent. The road to Yakutsk is so frozen that the road is frozen solid. It is only in the summer that the road periodically becomes impassable. In the autumn the road freezes back and becomes even better than most soil roads. In the dead of winter there is no problem as vehicles drive over the frozen Lena Highway. Cars are allowed to drive up to 70 kmh (45 mph). In fact, one report suggested some vehicles even drive over the Lena River as well in the winter! It becomes a solid block of ice.

But watch out for Summertime! Believe or not, Yakutsk is actually cut off from the world much of the time during the summer. In a story I read about a 2001 flood caused by the overflowing Lena River, it said Yakutsk does not even have railroad! This means that in the summer when it rains, Yakutsk is virtually inaccessible except by boat or plane.

And even the boats are not much help.... the Lena River is impassable for large stretches of the year when it is full of loose ice, or when the ice cover is not sufficiently thick to support traffic, or when the water level is high and the river turbulent with spring flooding.

Get this: July temperatures often exceed 90 °F! This makes the Yakutia region among the greatest in the world for seasonal temperature differentials. This helps explain the mud road fiasco which you are about to witness. When it rains in Yakutsk, it pours! And the rains turn the Road to Yakutsk into a quagmire.

Unfortunately, this major artery does not have an asphalt surface even though it is a vital Federal highway. Attempts have been made to put down a proper surface, but the road immediately turns to mush the moment it thaws making repairs impossible. Consequently, in the summer, every time it rains, hundreds of cars become stuck in the mud.

Yakutia is an area of permafrost. The Lena Highway melts down to 1 meter every summer for 2...3 months (usually July and August) - that makes it impossible to build usual roads (using asphalt or concrete) there. Such roads are called “zimnik” (”zima” means “winter” in Russian).

In the autumn the road freezes back and becomes even better than usual soil roads, but that is little consolation to those stuck in the summertime mud. The pictures you are about to see were made in August 2006 at the start of the problem. Ultimately 600 cars got stuck there. In other words, as bad as things are in the pictures you are about to view, they only hint at how impossible the conditions can really be.

A car can be trapped in the quagmire for days. According to witnesses, hunger and lack of the fuel are all part of these mud traps. One woman even gave birth to a child right in the public bus she was riding because no ambulance could possibly get to her.

Making things worse, people are afraid to come to the rescue. There is a report of construction teams that were afraid to appear on site when called. It turned out that during their previous visit they were beaten by people who had been stuck in the jam for a few days. So now the cars and trucks are left to fend for themselves. Only in Russia.

Lawlessness is common. People often break the locks on the trucks in a search of food and warm clothing. Fuel, food, firearms and steel tow-line cables are needed most during the rainy days on the Lena Highway.

Apparently Russia is infamous for its bad roads. For instance, the cynics insist Russia's bad roads had more to do with stopping the advance of the German army in World War II than anything the Red Army did.

I decided to ask my friend Olga about the Russian roads. Olga was raised in Russia, but now works here in Houston. This is what Olga had to say.

Old stuff but good example of a situation where centuries of lack of free enterprise has squashed people's ability to fix problems.

I think it's more appropriate to say that centuries of the lack of free enterprise has squashed people's desire to fix problems. After all, why go through the effort and take the risk if there is no reward.

The USSR is the perfect example of Atlas Shrugging, en masse.

8
posted on 07/26/2010 4:12:21 PM PDT
by meyer
(Big government is the enemy of freedom.)

The original Alaska Highway was built over similar terrain during WWII. Some of the building techniques were definitely “low tech” as in “corduroy roads” using trees laid side-by-side perpendicular to the direction of the road over the worst of the sinkholes.

Sadly, if a majority of our dumbed down electorate continues to elect rulers from the Washington aristocracy, that will be our fate, too, only without the oil (because we won’t be allowed to drill it).

25
posted on 07/26/2010 4:37:29 PM PDT
by piytar
(Journomarxists didnt go away. They just moved to a more secure venue...)

It sounds like this road was intended to be used in the winter when the river was frozen. The road surface would also be frozen, and trucks could travel over it. During the summer goods could travel by river. The road wasn’t intended for private cars or summer travelers.

I'd cut the Russians a little slack on this one. I'm not sure the technology exists to solve this problem.

It might not be cheap, and I've only given it 30 seconds of thought, but some kind of rectangular frame (cross-section in the direction of travel) that could rest on the permanent permafrost below and provide a base for a roadway topside might be the answer. Metal might be too thermally conductive, and concrete isn't cheap... well, never mind.

Yakutsk is a destination of the Lena Highway. The city's connection to the highway is only accessible by ferry in the summer, or in the dead of winter, directly over the frozen Lena River, as Yakutsk lies entirely on its western bank, and there is no bridge anywhere in the Sakha Republic that crosses the Lena. The river is impassable for long periods of the year when it is full of loose ice, or when the ice cover is not sufficiently thick to support traffic, or when the water level is high and the river turbulent with spring flooding. The highway ends on the eastern bank of Lena in Nizhny Bestyakh (Нижний Бестях), an urban-type settlement of some four thousand people. Yakutsk is connected with Magadan in by the Kolyma Highway.

A dual-use railroad and roadway bridge over the Lena is scheduled to be built by 2013, when the Amur Yakutsk Mainline, the North-South railroad being extended from the South, will finally connect the city with the East-West Baikal Amur Mainline (the railway has reached a point some 260 km south of Yakutsk).

The bridge will be over 3 kilometers long and constructed 40 km upriver at Tabaga, where the river narrows and does not create a wide flooded area in spring. In the dead of winter, the frozen Lena makes for a passable highway for ice truckers using its channel to deliver provisions to far-flung outposts. Yakutsk is also connected to other parts of Russia by the Yakutsk Airport.

I agree a paved road wouldn't hold up over that permafrost. OTOH, Alaska maintains the Dalton Highway up to Prudhoe as an all weather gravel road. Of course, it's in Alaska's interest to maintain the road as the supplies to the oil fields run on it. But wouldn't a similar incentive exist for the Russians to maintain an al-weather road to support their exploitation of Siberia's mineral wealth?

Yakutsk is a remote city in Eastern Siberia (population 200,000) famous for two things: appearing in the classic board game Risk, and the fact that it can, convincingly, claim to be the coldest city on earth. Source

I remember when the potholes on Brookpark road would display the brick pavement and streetcar tracks beneath the asphalt covering. I don't know if they ever rebuilt that road or not, or if maybe they just added a few more inches of asphalt above the brick road base. I've lived in Tennessee for the last 8 or 9 years.

45
posted on 07/26/2010 5:20:23 PM PDT
by meyer
(Big government is the enemy of freedom.)

I live at the end of the Taylor highway in Eagle, Alaska; highway has been washed out including bridges for 3 weeks; maybe single lane nx weekend. Dang Feds won’t let state have permits to fix it right, so they keep putting up single lane sections and road keeps giving way off the cliff.

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